25 days left until DanceWeekend!
Our countdown to DanceWeekend’22 continues with Sashar Zarif Dance Theatre! Sashar will be performing Sunday July 17 at 3:30pm at the Fleck Dance Theatre.
www.sashardance.com
FB: @sashar.zarif
IG: @zarif.sashar
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself/your company?
Sashar Zarif Dance Theatre’s mandate is to facilitate a nomadic exploration of the old and the new, integrating dance, choreography, and storytelling. It mines living histories and new expressions of the dances of Western and Central Asia, the Sufi and Shamanic roots of Islamic societies, and the diverse world in which we live. SZDT is at once intensely focused on contemporary exploration, and, at the same time, the very embodiment of ancient mystical dance traditions.
The poetry within my memory has provided inspiration to explore the notion of dreams. My practice has been an attempt to mobilize memories and experiences in order to reconnect with the lives, times and places that have fuelled my journey. As I complete the third decade of my artistic life, I would like to review and renew my commitments so that I can move forward for another decade with an even greater awareness and appreciation of all that I have been given from people and dance.
My artistic practice is a process of transforming my personal journey in life to my communal journey in the world. A transformation that works towards an ongoing inquiry into my personal and social-cultural reality. This practice aims to provide stimulus to my own individual mental, physical, and emotional life in order to inspire or facilitate myself to undertake a wider range of experiences that can foster a higher degree of self-realization, self expression, and awareness of belonging to the self, to a community, and to the world at large concurrently.
What will you be sharing at DanceWeekend’22?
Grandmother’s Drum
Choreographed and performed by Sashar Zarif
Creative Facilitator: Katherine Duncanson
Light Design: Arun Srinivasan
(Grandmother’s Drum premiered as part of Night Shift 2021, produced by Citadel + Compagnie, co-presented with Fall for Dance North)
Grandmother’s Drum by Sashar Zarif, is a ritual of sound and movement that explores the concept of ownership versus stewardship of home as it is practiced in nomadic culture.
The work is in the contemporary style of Maugham, informed by the Sufi and Shamanic transformation ritual from Central and Western Asia, and is related to Islamic Cultures. The influences are rooted in the artist’s nomadic ancestry.
How has the pandemic shifted your work as a professional dance artist?
I am still trying to understand what has happened and happening to my professional life. but now more than ever, I am certainly more aware of the fact that for me dance is not a profession, but a way of life. My dance suffers from the product oriented world we live in today. pandemic has shifted my profession in many ways, but most importantly has has challenged its mandate and goals.
Please share what you are most looking forward to at Dance Ontario’s return to live performances at DanceWeekend?
Gathering, connecting and sharing
Do you have any up-coming performances/workshops/events you would like to share?
Sashar Zarif Collaboration with Nagata Shachu’s 23rd seasons’s finale titled
MA | The Space Between Us
Sunday, May 22 @ 7 pm, Al Green Theatre (750 Spadina Ave.). Tickets to go on sale Jan 17.
In 1 or 2 sentences, what does dance mean to you?
“I migrate through time and space to access what is beyond time and space. I share this ritual through my breathing body. As a human-dancing, I take my movement experience through a cross-examination within the silent walls of the lonely and sacred stage.”—Sashar Zarif
Photo by Mahla Ghasempour